ebrown_p wrote:Sorry I wasn't clear Thomas. There is an economic incentive educational material for software Engineers (who are quite profitable now with disposible income on their own). I was working on educational material for K-12 public schools. Kids in general, and their parents don't have the resources to develop the material that is needed.
There is also an economic incentive to write childrens books like
Tom Sawyer and
Little House in the Prairie -- which children can then read in class. There is an economic incentive to write novels for the enjoyment of grown-ups, which school children can borrow in the library and read. (They range from
The Catcher in the Rye, to
Grapes of Wrath to
In Cold Blood. There is a competitive market for teaching foreign languages to grown-ups. Children can learn foreign languages from these. As for math, I know for a fact that one of my great-grandfathers has learned geometry directly from Euclid's
Elements, and learned it well. Euclid's
Elements, to my knowledge, were not commissioned by the city of Athens, and certainly not by the kingdom of Württemberg. As for social sciences, there are treaties, inaugural addresses, and Supreme Court opinions, downloadable for free from the web. The teacher can just download them, assign them to his students, and ask them to develop their own opinions about them. Considering all this, I see no need of writing educational material specifically for K12 highschools at all.
ebrown_p wrote:Public education is a great example. Providing a public education to children in your society is a clear benefit for all involved.
Compared to what? Providing no education at all, or providing a good private education? If you mean the former, I have no quarrel with you. Education is better than no education. But if you mean the latter, I'd like to see your evidence you may have for it. As for myself, the evidence I've seen so far comes from E.G. West:
Education and the Industrial Revolution. Batsford (1975). It compares the 19th century educational history of England, the last European country to nationalize education, with Prussia, the first European country to do so. Looking at metrics like enrolment, literacy, and so forth, he finds that England was doing slightly better. He also finds that his data is not conclusive enough to prove that England actually
did better. But if the currently prevailing opinion about public schooling was correct, Prussian schools should have cleaned England's clock, and they haven't. That's a bit of a disappointment for me, because I'd expect a privatized school system to do much better than a public one. But it also refutes that you need government to give your country's children a decent education.
Do you have more conclusive evidence than that?
ebrown_p wrote:The private sector is not a very good model to provide education at a national level as there is no short-term individual market for it. Private solutions tend to provide education that benefits a small proportion of society in a focussed limited way.
I would have said that the benefit from an education mostly goes to the person who gets it. There is a complication because the person here is a child, and letting the parents decide produces a principal-agent problem. But this problem seems much less grave to me when the parents are the agent than when the government is.
ebrown_p wrote:How do you end slavery in an anarchy?
You don't need to, because you need a government to establish slavery in the first place. How do you deport Dred Scott from Illinois back to Missouri without a government? How do you suppress Spartacus's slave riot without a government? You would have a much stronger case if you had asked how an anarchy can protect private property that people have a rightful claim to. But the example of slavery cuts both ways at best, and cuts against your argument in the worst.
